Currently, there are various ways to stream video online. Common use cases include streaming video content to gaming services such as Twitch, Azubu or Hitbox. Oftentimes, video streaming is also used for remote desktop access and other online applications. However, a significant challenge with streaming video is that video streaming is restricted by the Internet connection of the end user, especially when streaming large amounts of data. The large amounts of bandwidth can saturate the local connection. This makes streaming difficult or impossible for many users, dramatically reducing the size of the addressable market.
Cloud gaming is virtualization technology that uses video to stream game content to an end user with a thin client. The end user does not need to install the game to be play. Instead the content is streamed from the cloud server as video. As with streaming, this requires significant bandwidth and is only suitable for users with a high bandwidth connection. This is counter-intuitive; if a user has lots of bandwidth, they would just download and install the game. Cloud gaming is not suitable for latency sensitive data as there is significant communications lag between the client and the cloud server. This makes cloud gaming unsuitable for real-time gaming, and as a result it has not received significant market adoption.
It is therefore an objective of the present invention to introduce a method that users can utilize to overcome such problems. The proposed invention combines video streaming technology with cloud gaming virtualization technology, with an inverted architecture. This allows for more efficient bandwidth usage from the client side, particularly when streaming video from games or other situations where footage can be rendered elsewhere prior to streaming.